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        <title>Learning/Understanding Radio2ipod</title>
        <meta name="AppleTitle" content="Learning Understanding Radio2ipod"/>
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            <h2>Learning/Understanding Radio2ipod</h2>
        
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            Blah blah blah.
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            <!-- The more they understand, the less they have to memorize. The 
            only way to reduce the time and pain of the learning curve is 
            to increase learning. Too many manuals mistake reference information 
            and memorization for learning, but we've all experienced the 
            frustration of looking something up, doing it, and then forgetting 
            everything the next time we need to do it again. The only way to 
            really make it "stick" is by helping them 'get it' on a deeper level, 
            where the mental model (thought bubble) in their head matches the one 
            you were trying to communicate... the mental model that lets them 
            extrapolate and infer and be creative about things that weren't in 
            the tutorial.

            While a tutorial is a concrete step-by-step use-case, without a deeper 
            understanding of how and why things work the way they do, the user/learner 
            can have trouble adapting what they did in the tutorial to their own 
            unique use-cases. We've all seen users who end up bending and shoehorning 
            their own work into something that more closely matches what the tutorial 
            did, simply because that's the only way they know how to do it!

            By including a learning and understanding section in the manual, you have 
            the best chance to help users get out of "P mode and - most importantly - want 
            to. This is where you take them from surface users who must call tech support 
            at the first instant anything goes wrong to users who become engaged with the 
            product and enjoy co-discovering all the ways in which the product will help 
            them kick ass.

            It is this part of the manual where the advertising, marketing, and 
            entertainment folks have something to teach us. It is up to us to get the 
            user/learner motivated to not just Open The Manual, but to want to actually... 
            learn new things. Learning new things usually sucks at first, because it 
            means we have to pass through the phase of frustration, confusion, stupidity, 
            anger, etc. Most humans avoid learning anything that comes with a manual, and 
            will try to do as little as possible to get the bare minimum level of competency.

            This won't do if we're actively trying to create and inspire passionate users. 
            We have to make this part of the manual especially enticing, compelling, seductive, 
            entertaining, informative, useful... all without (as many of you warned) making 
            it appear like a shallow sales pitch.

            This is also where it really needs to be memorable. It's amazing how much 
            written documentation is meant to be remembered, but anything BUT memorable. 
            Memory is tied to chemistry, and the brain pays attention and records to 
            long-term memory that which the brain finds important. What your conscious 
            mind wants has nothing to do with it - this is about your legacy brain recognizing 
            that this new thing is useful for long-term survival. And let's face it - most of 
            the content in user manuals are far, far, far, from something the brain thinks 
            is important enough to store.

            So, we have to trick the brain into thinking that [insert widget A into widget B 
            and configure server C...] is just as important (or life-threatening) as the tiger 
            licking his lips outside your cave. And who better to help us make things stand 
            out than advertisers and marketers? Entertainers and graphic designers? Really 
            Good Storytellers? There are a ton of things that can get past the brain's crap 
            filter, but we have to care enough to create a manual that's brain-friendly, not 
            just user-friendly. And the brain is sooooo much pickier about what it attends 
            to and records. -->
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